Taking and long, hard look

 For the last week or so I’ve been reviewing my back catalogue of short stories. 

The trigger for this was reading editors’ comments on Twitter.  Several were saying that often a rejection didn’t have anything to do with the quality of the writing,  They are turning down stories they consider to be brilliant every day. It’s more about whether the story fits the magazine’s style, or whether they’ve already bought something like it recently.

In the past this subjectivity has depressed and infuriated me.  There’s nothing I can do about editors’ subjectivity.  But this time I saw a tweet from an author which changed my mindset.  She had just sold a short story after 63 rejections.  And that got me thinking about my patchy submissions record,  What I found was a pattern of submitting each new story to five or six magazines and then giving up on it.  And because I record dates on my submission log, I could see that there are a lot of stories which have not been anywhere since 2015 or 2016.

So clearly I need to try harder.  But the Imposter Syndrome was whispering in my ear, asking me if those stories really were good enough to submit.  To shut the Imposter up, I decided to take a long, hard, look at every one of my stories.  I have a couple of hundred of them, five lever arch files’ worth.  So I started at A and I’m working my way through each story in each file. I’m reading every story out loud,and if it needs editing, then I do the edits and re-read it out loud.  If the story doesn’t need editing it gets entered on my submission-ready stories list.

I wake early these days, so for the last two weeks I have sat at my desk for a couple of hours before the sun rises, with a cup of Earl Grey tea to hand, reviewing stories.  I’ve found that my remembered perceptions of them are wrong. In my mind I’d classified several as lightweight and having no important theme.  Reading through them, I saw that every story had a clear issue or theme at its heart.

The aim of this long, hard look at my stories is to kick out the Imposter.  When I finish my edits I will have polished stories in every one of those five files.  I will also have a list of those publication-ready stories to hand as an aid to deciding what story goes where.  This new list is intended to make submitting a mechanical process.  When I am certain the stories are publication-ready I can just send them out again immediately they’re rejected.

I’m hoping this mechanical process will short-circuit all the anger I feel at rejections now, and make them something remote from me.  Let’s see how I get on with this in the new year.